Aloud
by empty gun
Summary: Little slices of the past, from the beginning of Jake and Kriem's life together.


Kriem, for better or worse, was not immune to disappointment as it pertained to her.

Disappointment with her existence in general, which she received from her parents, disappointment with her existence in general, which she received herself as well. She remembered mornings before school (and they all seemed winter mornings in her memory, dark and full of emotional discord), squinting at her appearance in the mirror, skinny, pale-faced. It wasn't the appearance, but the person behind the skin, the abnormality that made her sick of looking at herself after a glance. Asking why she wasn't normal was a question long past its welcome and useless. She'd spent all of her hatred at fate, God, whatever the hell any of it was and focused it on herself. It wasn't God's fault that she was who she was. It wasn't anyone's. So she blamed herself from the sheer lack of anyone to blame.

Classmates were simply disgusted with her, and that, along with the disappointment and sometimes disdain reflected back on her, so much like a mirror as well. Some days when there was no one to talk to, she would sharpen one of those hairs that made her what she was, and bring her doll to life.

"I don't know why I still do this," she whispered one (cold-morning-dark) night to the doll, its glass eyes staring at the ceiling. Its fingers moved slightly, a sensation that had long lost its oddity, since, after all, she'd told it to do that. "I don't know why, because they think I'm so awful. They think I'm weird. Do you think I'm weird?"

The doll nodded and Kriem laughed, pulling the covers over her head, making the doll still again. "The one person I can make agree with me in the world, and I can't make it like me anymore than I like me."

Some days when there was no one to talk to, she talked to herself.

"Is that irony, Kriem?"

She pulled the doll under the covers with her. "Is that irony?"

She hoped one day she'd find someone to disagree with her about all the abrasive things she'd been taught to circle in her head, the mantra of self-loathing.

That's why disappointing Jake, or upsetting Jake or making Jake annoyed was, as Kriem would put it later, "a big deal." She'd found, eventually, the one person who didn't look at her with disdain. She wanted him to look at her without disdain forever.

Relationships of any sort, any relationship not built on superficiality, have that slope. Relationships, as Kriem knew from her admittedly limited knowledge of them, were not immune to gravity. Whatever went up went down. There was good but not without bad, opposites etc. You couldn't be happy without anger because human beings didn't work that way. Human beings were incomprehensible, nasty things. Dolls would forever agree with her or disagree with her depending on how she felt, but real, breathing, thinking, humans full of free will would have adverse reactions to the expected. You couldn't inject a human and control them. It was interesting.

Cohabitation sped up the process of the eventuality of an argument, Kriem found. She supposed she didn't even know her parents well enough to realize this. You live with someone for long enough (providing they don't ignore you) and sometimes they will piss you off. But the familiarity with disappointment didn't make it hurt any less.

A few weeks after she'd moved in with Jake, she'd made soup for the first time, the impressive non-canned type of soup and she'd put in too much salt. The entire soup (chicken noodle, so deceptively easy) had tasted of it. Jake had eaten it anyway and just laughed at her. It wasn't a cruel laugh by any means, but his amusement at her embarrassment had made her even more embarrassed. She wished he'd found it disgusting and had been mad at her for ruining dinner. She'd drawn up into herself, picking at the toasted French bread she'd almost burnt, her face red.

"Eat."

"It tastes like a block of salt."

"Eh, everyone's gotta start somewhere." He'd cracked his piece of bread and gestured towards her. "Salt the water when you're boiling pasta. These egg noodles are pretty big, but don't salt it too much. That's the only way the pasta will ever get salted. Season the broth later. Taste it."

He took a sip of his beer. "That was Cooking with Jake Martinez."

"I almost burnt the bread."

"That one's a hanging offense," he said dryly. She hoped he didn't expect a laugh.

Jake was a complicated man and from the moment he introduced himself and bought her a burger a little while later - when she couldn't hide her hunger from him - it was exciting.

She could remember the diner he'd taken her to, the chairs cold to the underside of her thighs, exposed by her short school skirt. There were the sounds of Christmas music drifting from every shop, and last minute shoppers moving around each other with large wrapped packages, for someone they loved, hopefully. The diner was cold, like the chairs, the smell of cooking meat made her mouth water. A tv mounted on the wall above their table played a boxing match silently, the captions lagging. She remembered all of these details, and when Jake went to jail five years later it was these tiny little memories that hurt the most. The world now, for the cloudy afternoon, was so much more vivid. She felt like a movie heroine with a catalyst for change, a reason for living. She could remember wishing she'd ordered a Coke instead of water, nervous when a waitress had approached them.

He'd surprised her by reading her mind right then. He did it very few times afterward, because he knew she found it distasteful. She couldn't hide that - after all, he knew she'd thought it.

Sometimes she didn't know when he was joking, and sometimes he was too sarcastic, and sometimes so charming that it was still surprising when she realized he was a man who was, for lack of better word, a criminal. For the first few days, when he'd brought her to his modest, almost un-lived-in apartment, she wondered if it wasn't some big ruse, that was going to kill her. Sudden exposure to Jake made her realize the jejune lens with which she'd viewed the world. People were good and bad! People were evil or they weren't! Jake was a rotten, horrible person but he was the man who'd saved her. So there was that.

Jake wouldn't involve her with anything she thought of, in kind of a vague way, as Work, at first. Anything involving Ouroboros especially, which was shrouded in mystery and intrigue and the only thing she knew about it was that Jake had a peculiar symbol tattooed on his arm of a snake, and that was Ouroboros. That only lasted a little while.

She didn't think of herself as his partner, but she knew he didn't think of himself as a mentor. Their relationship was this weird shifting plate of dynamics that didn't settle. He talked to her like an equal, but the idea of being an equal to him was absurd to her.

Three days after her eighteenth birthday, Jake had given her responsibility to help with something for the syndicate, for Work and she couldn't even think back on it except in the most ambiguous of terms. She had, in his words, "fucked _that_ up." She realized, for the first time, that watching someone kill someone and killing someone yourself was an entirely different thing and even though she had no crisis of faith regarding the flippancy with which Jake viewed murder, she did think herself a coward. He'd been angry enough over her screw-up that he had just glared, jutted his jaw and didn't talk to her for a bit.

"Maybe," he said an hour later, and had said it honestly and without passive-aggression, "I just thought too much of you too soon."

She didn't want him to know she'd been crying, so she'd balled up her fists and felt angry instead, which was a dangerous reaction. All that had come out was a whisper. "Too soon?"

"You're young, and that's my fault, Kriem."

"I'm eighteen. I'm -"

"A kid. Look, don't worry about it."

Kriem felt even worse, if that was possible.

They didn't speak for two days, and on the third day, Kriem couldn't feel any tenser if she'd tried. She became aware she felt guilty and not humiliated anymore. She was a coward, and this wasn't too-salty soup. Jake had trusted her.

She had a few teddy bears she kept in her room (old habits, comfort objects) and didn't even realize she was still clinging to one the next morning when she'd gone up to Jake, who was eating corn flakes and reading the Sternbild paper.

"The bear is not helping your case, Kriem." He'd lowered the paper and Kriem bit her lip.

"Mr. Jake, it's not your fault you asked me to do something and I couldn't do it."

She looked down at the bear. "It's mine, if I say I'm an adult, I should be responsible."

"If you're an adult, you don't have to tell people you're an adult." He took a bite of his cereal. "That's being grown-ups 101."

Kriem pulled out the chair opposite him and slid into it tenderly. "I was scared when you were angry."

"You don't trust me, huh?"

"No, it's not that!" She bit her lip again, harder. "I was afraid of you being angry, but being angry at myself is so much worse."

"What do you want me to do about that? Not talk to you?"

"No!"

"Act like a kid too? Punish you?"

"No ..." She pressed her face into the bear, sighing.

She heard him crinkling the paper and assumed he'd lifted it back to read, ignoring her childish guilt. She looked up and was immediately greeted with a whack on the head, of the Sternbild Times rolled up in his hand.

"Bad. There, we're even."

She didn't even realize she'd dissolved into laughter until he'd laughed too, and the guilt was bad, almost worse, but useless. Setting the bear on the table, she injected it with a hair.

"Mr. Jake, I have these powers." The bear stood up. "I'm going to do my job with them."

Weeks and weeks later after first nights, and terror and horrible soup, she found a drawing she assumed Jake had done. It was a cityscape in pencil and she recognized it as a part of Sternbild she'd only been to a few times, just a random street. It was very competently done, obviously, because she had recognized it.

She asked him about it over soup for dinner (perfect soup, flawlessly salted soup) and Jake had paused, mouth full. He swallowed and said he liked to draw, yeah.

"I've always wanted to have a hobby like that," said Kriem. She broke off a piece of French bread to dip in her soup, but paused, her fingers over it.

"I used to keep a diary, but I couldn't really write." She opened her mouth to ask something, but instead quickly dunked the bread and stuffed it in her mouth. _You should teach me to draw_, she thought.

He'd caught that.

"There's nothing to teach," said Jake. "I don't know, you draw or you don't."

Kriem swallowed. "There's books teaching people how to draw."

"Okay, quick lesson." Jake grinned, showing his teeth. "This is how you draw a head, I'll tell ya. Draw a circle."

Kriem made a mental note. "Okay, a circle."

"Draw a line down the middle."

"Okay."

"Then draw the rest of the face."

"Mr. Jake!"

He obviously thought it was a grand joke, because he laughed harder than Kriem would've if she made the same joke. She puffed her cheeks, and then laughed despite herself. It was a gorgeous drawing and if she could draw like that, she wouldn't be inclined to share her secrets either.

She took a walk later, around the neighborhood in the January cold, and went the other way, the way where the big dog nearby wouldn't chase her. It was out of the way to the cafe where she'd found she liked to get coffee, and by the time she'd started back, it'd begun to snow.

"I really wish ..." she said out loud and never finished the sentence, sucking in a mouthful of cold wind. There was no reason to talk to herself aloud.

There was so much detail in the world; it was as though she had opened her eyes wider after squinting. She wanted to record it all, keep it to herself and remember being happy. She wished she could draw because she'd draw everything.

The night after Jake was arrested, so many years later, she wished she hadn't remembered everything in such detail because it hurt so much worse. She made herself sick crying more than once, over such small, small matters and the big ones, she was alone, and she was heartbroken.

Things were new now, though, in this strange time. The air was cold and the night was falling, orange streetlights casting their glow on lazy drifts of snow. Disappointment, sadness and anger were such trivial trade-offs for a rich happiness like this.


End file.
